- Posts: 4431
- Thank you received: 5175
Bugs: Recent Topics Paging, Uploading Images & Preview (11 Dec 2020)
Recent Topics paging, uploading images and preview bugs require a patch which has not yet been released.
Please consider adding your quick impressions and your rating to the game entry in our Board Game Directory after you post your thoughts so others can find them!
Please start new threads in the appropriate category for mini-session reports, discussions of specific games or other discussion starting posts.
What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Related, my wife and I have been playing Unmatched. She didn't like her first two games at all but something about it had her wanting to revisit. Now that we're several games in and know what everyone does the game's gotten way better. There's mind games, meta decisions, and it really sings. We almost didn't give it that chance but I'm glad we did.
Is The North worth it? Dunno. Haven't played. But maybe!
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- hotseatgames
- Offline
- D12
- Posts: 7162
- Thank you received: 6270
We all spread out, exploring the ship. One player attempted to shut down the self-destruct sequence and check ship coordinates while myself and one other checked the engines. That player failed to shut down the sequence... the ship would blow up in 3 turns, for sure. This meant hibernation was not an option; it's escape pod or nothing. There were 3 escape pods on the ship, and four players. Each pod can hold two people, IF the first person in doesn't immediately launch.
Exploring the ship was a bigger task than intended... the two rooms that let you access escape pods were literally the last 2 rooms discovered. I had found the alien Nest, but couldn't obtain an egg because an Intruder was in there with me. I was out of ammunition, badly wounded, and running out of time. Even traversing the ship before explosion would be difficult, and I still didn't have an egg. I had at least managed to send the signal, remotely, thanks to my skill at using computers (I was the Scientist). I futilely punched the alien until it eviscerated me. A turn prior, one other player had also been shredded while trying to make it to an escape pod.
Meanwhile, the villain who started this whole mess had actually made it into a pod, but he was just sitting there, not launching. We would find out why soon....
The last remaining player had a SHRED of a chance to actually make it onto a pod. He was surrounded by aliens and had few cards left in his hand. It would require a supreme act of luck but I was actually rooting for him since it would have been an epic victory of sorts. Earlier, he had actually defeated the Queen, drawing the only lucky card that would kill it with two wounds. He was also later torn to pieces, and the chaos player launched the escape pod to victory. His goal? To be the only survivor.
One player, who highly over-values winning in games, was not crazy about the game. It has a LOT of luck-based elements to it, and in general, every turn makes your situation go from bad to worse. Survival should not be expected. The winner liked it a LOT, and I also like it. I think it tells great stories, and if you are playing this one as some high strategy title, you are doing it wrong. This is for fans of things like Psycho Raiders, which is probably why the more "strategy" minded people in my group weren't as keen on it.
Still, they agreed that it was hard to form a true opinion since this was their first time and the game was essentially cut in half from the start by the self-destruct sequence. It will hit the table again in two weeks. We will see.
We finished the night by trying the team mode of The King is Dead. This was the first time any of us had played the game outside of its peak state, which is three players. With 4, you divide into 2 teams of 2 and you can't discuss strategy with your teammate. My teammate ended up being Mr. Chaos from the Nemesis game. He spent most of the game falling asleep and forgetting the victory condition, and we lost. I continue to think you should only play this game with 3.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- Posts: 845
- Thank you received: 703
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- Erik Twice
- Offline
- D8
- Needs explosions
- Posts: 2300
- Thank you received: 2650
I played Brass Lancashire again. It's a great game but it's true there are a couple issues or dominant strategies that run through it. Double rails are extremely strong and being able to beat unsuspecting players by getting loans at the end of the canal era and then spamming isn't much fun. Not having many real options on the last few turns of the game is also fairly annoying
In that sense, Birgimham is more fun. Sure, it's not as tight and it may have its own dominant strategies but it has more going for it. Not that it is a competition, I think both are good and pretty much different scenarios not unlike additional maps for Steam are.
D-Day Dice is weird. It's a cooperative Yathzee-like game with a WW2 theme. I don't know what to make it other than it was hard.
March of the Ants remains a great game and the best 4x in the market. The mechanics are great, but the cards really push it to the next level. All the evolutions are interesting, fun and lead to interesting gameplay. They are all rules-breaks, like being able to fly, exploding to deal damage to other ants or gaining VP by harvesting your own larvae (!). I'm a big supporter of this game and I think there are plenty of good reasons to be.
I've done like 14 drafts of Throne of Eldraine on Magic: The Gathering Arena. That's more boosters than I've ever opened in real life. The format is ok. There are a couple well-defined archetypes which is fun, but games just drag on an stalemate and some cards can be quite nasty (that Inkeeper is busted). Food (2, tap, gain 3 life) is a terrible mechanic that has been developed to the point you do interesting things about, but it remains terrible by not having a real purporse in-game. treasures and specially clues are much better designs. Not bad, but I miss Dominaria.
PD: Questing Beast is the ugliest, most pushed design in the history of Magic.
--
Also, while not a boardgame I've started the first session of my first D&D campaign and hence my first "real" RPG campaign. We are using a module called Mines of Phandelver which I'm told is a well-known starter adventure. It was ok. I felt the game was pretty slow. In retrospective, using a grid was not worth the time for its gameplay value (Two in front, two in the back doesn't require a grid).
I'm playing a bard so that might have been part of it: Having spent all my spells on the first combat I didn't have enough for the second and mostly durdled around. That's not very fun and by the time I could roleplay I was feeling a bit tired and didn't take advantage of it. That said, I may have gone expecting a much more social game while I can assure you that my team is composed exclusively of murderhobos. Too much torture and needless murder for my taste.
D&D feels old-fashioned in that it has initiative rolls and very large dice spreads. I can't compare to other games because I've only played a couple VtM, GURPS and CoC one shots.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Erik Twice wrote: Also, while not a boardgame I've started the first session of my first D&D campaign and hence my first "real" RPG campaign. We are using a module called Mines of Phandelver which I'm told is a well-known starter adventure. It was ok. I felt the game was pretty slow. In retrospective, using a grid was not worth the time for its gameplay value (Two in front, two in the back doesn't require a grid).
I'm playing a bard so that might have been part of it: Having spent all my spells on the first combat I didn't have enough for the second and mostly durdled around. That's not very fun and by the time I could roleplay I was feeling a bit tired and didn't take advantage of it. That said, I may have gone expecting a much more social game while I can assure you that my team is composed exclusively of murderhobos. Too much torture and needless murder for my taste.
D&D feels old-fashioned in that it has initiative rolls and very large dice spreads. I can't compare to other games because I've only played a couple VtM, GURPS and CoC one shots.
I just started myself (played D&D 2.0 once, about 40 years ago so that probably shouldn't count), and my daughter is DM'ing that very same campaign. She could be wrong, but she says you can try to incapacitate rather than kill, if you ask before each attack.
I'm probably one of those murder hobos of which you speak. Some tied-up NPC got lippy during an interrogation and I got sick of his crap and stuffed a sword in his eye. 'Neutral good' is on my sheet, but too much killing stuff on the PC might have made me a tad bit bloodthirsty WRT the mobs.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- Erik Twice
- Offline
- D8
- Needs explosions
- Posts: 2300
- Thank you received: 2650
Truth to be told, I just don't like murdering sentinent beings because. Part of it is personal, part of it is my experience with VtM and part of it is reading too much of the Order of the Stick and thinking Redcloak is kind of right.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- Sagrilarus
- Offline
- D20
- Pull the Goalie
- Posts: 8735
- Thank you received: 7349
barrowdown wrote: Played a second game of Scythe with my game group. I know we are a few years behind. I feel the game is firmly "okay". Nothing about it is super engaging or interesting, but it also has no real flaws. It just kind of happens and is very pretty to look at on the table. I would not turn down a game if others wanted to play, but I also do not feel I must get it to the table. As one of the players said, it never feels like you do anything because of how incremental the turns are. The map is too open with how limited movement is and combat always feels like checking a box on a list instead of gaining something. I would much rather play Cyclades in the same amount of time.
Yeah, that nails it. Scythe is the luke warm water of gaming.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
My experience with Unmatched thus far has felt a lot like learning a traditional fighting game, think Street Fighter. The first couple games will have you learning. Not the rules, those could fit on a notecard, but the decks and what each character is capable of. Once you figure out what everyone can do you can start playing your own game effectively. Then when you've wrangled your strategies and can execute on a gameplan without much cognitive load, you're actually playing the game.
A lot of skirmish games don't get this far, not because they aren't played enough, but because the combat itself tends to be really simple. Warhammer Underworlds is a fantastic game but its thinky bits are largely frontloaded into deck construction and setup; you end up hucking dice in order to get things done and there's not a lot for mitigation. Funkoverse is that but even more so. Wildlands kind of tried to make combat more engaging but ended up being a snoozefest throughout (Barnes says Dredd is better, it might be). But Unmatched's combat being simultaneous reveals of chosen cards in a skirmish engine gives it teeth far beyond what most games in the genre offer.
An example. I was playing Alice VS Medusa. Medusa's a personal favorite but we opted to swap. I managed to get some momentum, leaving her with few cards in hand and some particularly juicy ones in mine. One of the best, Looking Glass, only works on defense but gives Alice a ton of benefits. All I had to do was move in and swing. My opponent's on her last action. Rather than maneuver and retreat, she attacks.
This does not compute. She's going to be out of options, and Looking Glass will let me basically teleport next to her for a beatdown on my turn. I throw the card down and prepare to wreck shop. And then she reveals a Feint.
Every character has copies of Feint. It's a simple card with small numbers, but crucially it blanks the text on the other person's card. It's primarily a defensive tool to stop ridiculous combos from happening. But she, knowing that I was probably looking for an opportunity to chain-yank her, read me like a book and baited my best defensive option out effortlessly with a move that I never would have considered had I been in that position. Sure it didn't do damage, but my entire next turn was basically voided by literally feinting an offense.
There are moments like this every play and every character offers varied choices to the point that you're inevitably going to find a favorite. There isn't another game doing what Unmatched does right now, and certainly not as elegantly. You really should play it, ideally several times.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- Posts: 845
- Thank you received: 703
Josh Look wrote: I’ve actually come around on it and enjoy it quite a bit. Some of my group has, too, but those that haven’t are keeping it from being played.
I'm not sure why I would play it over Cyclades. It takes about the same amount of time, but it is so much livelier. I'm using Cyclades as my corollary because the game exists in a similar space to me (albeit with more encouragement of direct conflict).
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Me, I’ve played Cyclades into the ground. I’d love to find a great DOAM game with modern mechanics. So far, Scythe and Lords of Hellas come closest to what I want.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
I tend to not group games together by anything but mechanisms. Just about everything else is superficial window dressing. Two games might be area control or DOAM, that’s fine as nothing more than a starting point, but that’s not what’s important. How they get to where they’re going is what interests me. I have Cyclades, but I also have Scythe, Lords of Hellas, Tyrants of the Underdark, Nexus Ops, etc. The AC/DOAM isn’t what I’m looking at, it’s that one is action selection, one is an auction, one is a deck builder, and so on.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.